Lawyer up, animals!

Remember back when some Americans thought Barack Obama was the antichrist, hell-bent on wrecking everything from the oil industry to Christmas?

Good times!

Compared to Trump, Obama was an amateur. The haystack-headed Current Occupant is much more convincing as a Destroyer of Worlds, as is his minion David Bernhardt, Secretary of the Interior, who was, until very recently, a lobbyist for the Independent American Petroleum Institute, Cobalt International Energy and Halliburton.

What Republicans insist on calling the “updated” ESA began under Ryan Zinke, Trump’s ethically-challenged former Interior Secretary, who was forced to resign over–among other things–a dodgy land deal he cut with the CEO of Halliburton. Bernhardt, Zinke’s former deputy, declared his intentions last year in aWashington Post column stiff with Big Bidness buzz words: “transparency,” “efficiency,” and “unnecessary regulatory burdens.”

Translated from the original Corporate, it means that the ESA and its beach mouse-hugging, brown pelican-loving, black-footed ferret-favoring aficionados need to shut up and get with the capitalist program.

Ever since President Richard Nixon signed the ESA into law in 1973, the Act has helped save such critters as grizzly bears and bald eagles, key deer and whooping cranes, humpback whales and manatees–around 1,650 species in all.

Now the Trumpists plan to run a bulldozer through the ESA, making it harder to protect what’s left of our flora and fauna.

While they’re at it, they’ll dump that pesky language which said science, “without reference to possible economic or other impacts of determination” should govern whether a plant or animal should be listed as endangered.

Science: so overrated. So unprofitable.

Instead, the Dept. of Interior will consider the “economic impact.” In other words, an estimate of revenue “lost” from a ban on logging or mining or ranching or building on wild territory must be taken into account when considering a species for inclusion on the federal list.

The Lesser Prairie Chicken, currently designated as “threatened” (one step below “endangered”), lives in the path of the planned Keystone pipeline, which Trump is determined to see built. The bird (actually a member of the grouse family) had better get itself an attorney.

Who do you think will win in Trump’s America, wild charismatic megafauna or a bunch of developers who’ll undoubtedly contribute to his re-election campaign?

It gets worse: The ESA’s new rules will also disregard the effects of climate change on species whose homes may disappear out from under them. The ESA has always protected potential habitat as well as existing habitat: the catastrophic loss of sea ice, for example, means that polar bears may have to move to areas that will no longer be off-limits to human depredation.

Biodiversity, food, and clean water are all linked. Preserving land preserves the balance of the ecosystem and the source of food and water for much of the world. Lose that, and what white people think is an immigration crisis now will increase exponentially as climate refugees flee dying lands.

No wall will be high enough.

Here in Florida, we’re on the front line of both species loss and climate change. We’re flooding more. Salt water’s getting into our aquifers. It’s hotter, which means the seas will be warmer, making for bigger, more violent storms.

Diane Roberts is an 8th-generation Floridian, born and bred in Tallahassee, which probably explains her unhealthy fascination with Florida politics. Educated at Florida State University and Oxford University in England, she has been writing for newspapers since 1983, when she began producing columns on the legislature for the Florida Flambeau. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Times of London, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Oxford American, and Flamingo. She has been a member of the Editorial Board of the St. Petersburg Times–back when that was the Tampa Bay Times’s name–and a long-time columnist for the paper in both its iterations. She was a commentator on NPR for 22 years and continues to contribute radio essays and opinion pieces to the BBC. Roberts is also the author of four books, most recently Dream State, an historical memoir of her Florida family, and Tribal: College Football and the Secret Heart of America. She lives in Tallahassee, except for the times she runs off to Great Britain, desperate for a different government to satirize.